A stone has been thrown into the air as Chen Xuyuan, the president of the Chinese Football Association (CFA), is being scrutinized and investigated for alleged serious disciplinary violations. Chinese soccer has entered a serious cycle since Li Tie, the head coach of the national football team, was investigated last November. Before Chen Xuyuan, Liu Yi, former secretary-general of the CFA, and Chen Yongliang, former executive deputy secretary-general of the CFA and head of the national management department, were taken away by the authorities.
This big shake-up has made people feel a lot of emotions. I still remember that 13 years ago, a storm of "anti-gambling and anti-blackness" was unleashed on Chinese soccer. Over the past two years, many club managers, several international players and some FA members have been imprisoned. If at that time many people felt welcome and had new expectations for a "clean" Chinese soccer, then this string of "big fish" won, and more people felt frustrated and helpless. China's soccer road where the chaos is still frequent, chaos in the chaos, long time no good? Determined to dig to the end, Chinese soccer can still give people who care about it an explanation?
If calculated from the beginning of the "anti-gambling and anti-blackmail" in 2010, Chinese soccer has been lost for more than ten years. The biggest landscape is that the "gold dollar soccer" fire once burned the Chinese Super League to "Asia's first league", but in a round of "arms race", not only the investors do not know what to do, local There is no room for the development of local players. Based on a long history of youth training and infrastructure development, it became even more unsustainable. To this day, the tide is ebbing, leaving behind a weak Chinese Super League, a "lose-or-lose" national soccer team, and a fan base that is already dead in the water. As the "operator" of Chinese soccer, the leadership of the Chinese Football Association has changed again and again, and policies have been introduced round after round. Either the headache, or halfway, or the water of soccer is getting muddy. In addition, the Football Association has been criticized for blindly allowing the league to make way for the national team, and for overly interfering in the tactical development, selection and employment of the national team's coaches and other operations that violate the rules of soccer operation. Before Chen Xuyuan's fall from grace, some in the industry questioned him for being too eager for quick success. Over the years, every Football Association team has chanted the slogan of "respecting the laws of soccer", but has gone down a crooked path that deviates from the laws. You can hardly say that some of them don't have a "fire" for soccer, but why do they always end up giving people the impression of being a "lump of mud"?
As someone quipped, "Chinese soccer doesn't start with the dolls, it starts with the leaders." Of course, the problems of Chinese soccer cannot be solved by a few people. The purpose of anti-corruption is to excise the cancer. To truly give birth to new shoots and flesh, the problem must be solved in terms of respecting the laws and rationalizing the mechanism. In other words, what is lacking in Chinese soccer today is not money, but good seedlings. In the past World Cup in Qatar, Japan, South Korea and other Asian teams could play back and forth with many powerful European and South American teams, based on good youth training. Fans often joke, "Why can't China, with its 1.4 billion people, choose 11 players?" The reality is that there are just over 100,000 youth players under the age of 16 in China, compared to over 800,000 in Japan. China also has such pragmatic practices. Xu Genbao, for example, has been dormant on Chongming Island for more than a decade since 2000, and has developed a number of outstanding players through his "Genbao Football Base". Only this is too fragmented. If from the Football Association level to the industry can follow the law, seriously to the already rotten youth training system layer by layer to build up, China's soccer will have a future.
Soccer is never a one-time business, but patience and hard work. I hope that after this scrape and fresh start, Chinese soccer will not choose the wrong way. After all, in Asia, we have few opponents to lose.
